It was a sweet, pleasantly melancholy place. Very old trees of gigantic size overhung it with their broad leafy branches, so that not a ray could pierce. The ground was covered with thick moss; long, luxuriant grass was growing between the broken stones; the crevices in the old walls were all covered with dark-green ivy, and here and there a tall blooming shrub rose from the ruins. Upon the weather-beaten stone cross in the empty window sat a little bird and sang. That was the only sound heard far and near. It seemed only to make the stillness around more deeply felt. A lover of solitude would have been delighted with the place. But the baroness hardly raised her eyes from the ground to look hastily around. She had at all times little eye for the rays of the sun that came trembling through thick foliage, for dark shadows and other features in a beautiful landscape, and now her mind was preoccupied with very different thoughts. She sat down on a stone bench immediately under the empty window frame in which the little bird was singing, took a letter from her pocket and began to read it once more. It was the letter which Helen had written that morning, in the belief that her mother's assurance she would never inquire about her correspondence was to be relied on. Fully trusting in the sacredness of letters, she had given it to her maid, with orders to carry it to the kitchen, where the postman was refreshing himself with a cup of coffee. The maid had met the baroness in one of the passages, and the latter had asked her whose letter that was? Upon her answer that her mistress had given it to her, the baroness had taken it with the remark, that she would give it herself to the postman when her own letters were sent down.